Wrapped in the Flag (22 page)

Just a few months later, Walker was in the thick of the troubles in Mississippi. He even called for Americans from every state to march to Mississippi and help Governor Barnett keep James Meredith out of Ole Miss.

The situation in Oxford rapidly deteriorated, leading to two deaths and over two hundred injuries. According to
Time
, about two hundred were arrested, including General Edwin Walker.
¹¹
During the melee, Walker proclaimed that court orders allowing integration were part of “the conspiracy of the crucifixion by Antichrist conspirators of the Supreme Court.” One man close to Walker said, “There was a wild, dazed look in his eyes.”

My father said, “The General spoke the truth, and they made him
sound
crazy.”

Following the Oxford situation, which the JBS labeled the “Invasion of Mississippi,” Robert Welch said, “We are now reaching the point in the Communist timetable where it is necessary for the Central Government in the United States to demonstrate . . . how dangerous and futile it will be for the people anywhere, or their local governments, to resist that central power.”
¹²

In January of 1963, my parents found themselves a new hero—the newly elected governor of Alabama, George Wallace. He won them over after declaring, in his inaugural address, “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
¹³
Wallace went on to threaten a “Dixiecrat rebellion,”
Time
reported. “We intend to carry our fight for freedom across the nation. . . . We, not the insipid bloc of voters in some sections, will determine in the next election who shall sit in the White House.”

“George Wallace is a true statesman,” my father said.

“We have to stand with the governor now or it’ll be Chicago,” Mother added.

Five months later, I pulled the latest
Life
magazine from the stack of mail and headed upstairs. My parents condemned
Life
as a left-wing piece of crap, though like millions of Americans they subscribed. I didn’t care about the politics; I loved the photos. That week, Nelson Rockefeller and his new wife, Happy, graced the cover.

My parents loathed Rockefeller for his liberalness and for his divorce and quickie wedding. “He’s disgusting, and she’s a harlot,” my mother said of the couple.

“Rockefeller’s a Commie, period,” Dad said.

“Who cares?” I thought as I daydreamed through the magazine, skimming the stories and the ads. When I came to page twenty-five, I woke up.

In a grainy, black-and-white, uncaptioned photo, three civil rights protestors braced themselves against a building.
¹⁴
Their soaking wet clothes hugged their bodies. One man appeared to be shielding the woman next to him from the fire hoses that had been turned on them. In other shots, police dogs tore the clothes off young boys as they tried to run away. “Bull” Connor, the Birmingham police commissioner, described the scene saying, “I want ’em to see the dogs work. Look at those niggers run.”

I fell back on my bed and covered my eyes. “This cannot be happening in my country,” I told myself. I knew my parents and the JBS would be totally
supportive of Bull Connor and his methods. I also knew that there was nothing I could say to change their minds. The best thing for me was to shut up and earn enough money to go to Dallas.

Shortly after the Birmingham riots, Governor Wallace refused to comply with federal orders to integrate the University of Alabama. The situation escalated until President Kennedy called out the National Guard and forced the governor to stand down.
¹⁵
The schools in Alabama were eventually integrated, but not before Wallace had emerged as an icon for racists and right-wing extremists everywhere.

As African Americans continued to ride, sit in, and march for their civil rights, the JBS ramped up its rhetoric around the movement. Welch reminded all members that the whole idea of civil rights was conceived by the Communists to “foment racial riots in the South.”
¹⁶
The goal, Welch insisted, was “to break off one part of the United States after another until they [the Communists] have converted it into four separate Communist police states.”
¹⁷
All of this would be made possible by “brutal, ambitious and heavily armed Negroes operating in guerrilla bands, perpetrating vicious atrocities on their fellow Negroes.” And, lest the white folks relax, Welch continued, “These guerilla bands will be murdering the whites, too.”

Thanks to Welch, my parents were terrified. So was I, but my fear was for the safety of the protestors who wanted nothing more than the same rights white Americans had.

Late in August of 1963, while my parents were on their annual summer vacation in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I carted a drink, a peanut-butter sandwich, and the
Chicago Tribune
to our basement rec room. I scanned the front page and noticed a column about a protest march in Washington to be held that day.

Curious, I snapped on the TV and switched the channel to CBS. It took some time to adjust the rabbit ears, but gradually I got the picture focused. On the screen, thousands of people stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The crowd was so enormous that it spilled along both sides of the Reflecting Pool and stretched nearly to the Washington Monument.
¹⁸
I’d never seen anything like it.

It was August 28, 1963. The March on Washington was underway.

I watched as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped to the podium. I’d heard a lot about Dr. King. I’d heard he believed in a Negro country inside the United States. I heard he encouraged violence against whites. I’d heard he hired
thugs to terrorize black folks who disagreed with him. I’d heard he was as bad as they came.

But until that day, I’d never actually heard him.

From his first words, I was riveted. When he talked about the “fierce urgency of now” and “meeting physical force with soul force,” about his “dream rooted in the American dream,” that “sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners will sit at the table of brotherhood,” that children would “not be judged on the color of their skin but the content of their character,” and “little black boys and little black girls will join hands with white boys and white girls as brothers and sisters,” chills ran up my arms.
¹⁹
When the throng burst into “We Shall Overcome,” I stood in my basement, all alone, and sang with them: “We shall overcome some day.”

I touched my face. It was damp. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized I was crying.

To the radical conservatives, Dallas had become a kind of shrine, a Camelot of the right. . . . We who lived there began to feel that we were in the middle of a political caldera, a grumbling, reawakening fascist urge that was too hot to contain itself. I wonder what might have happened in Dallas if Kennedy hadn’t died there
.

—L
AWRENCE
W
RIGHT
¹

A few days after Dr. King’s March on Washington, Robert Welch sent an urgent letter to all JBS members. In it, he wrote, “It appears that the March on Washington was just one big bust! And that not even all of the exaggerated and glowing reports of the Liberal press could make it anything else. Maybe we could take a little credit for this outcome, through having helped to maintain both patriotism and common sense in some quarters where they were being extensively undermined.”
²

I didn’t read Welch’s missive when it arrived. I was on the Greyhound bus bound for Dallas, a trip that would take me south to Memphis and then across Arkansas and down into Big D. Gradually, Chicago melted into the suburbs; then there was no city at all, only cornfields as far as I could see.

As we pulled into a scheduled stop, the driver announced off-bus time for snacks and restrooms. At first, I turned my nose up at the crappy food and the filthy ladies’ rooms. Before long, I grabbed whatever passed for a meal and peed standing up. By the time we hit Memphis, I had made a vow: “No Greyhound again, ever. Free ticket or not.” When I stepped off the bus in the Dallas terminal, dirty and exhausted. I craved a hot shower and a real bed, but first I needed water.

Directly in front of me on the terminal wall were two drinking fountains.

Above one hung a sign—WHITE ONLY—with an arrow pointing down.

A foot away was another—COLORED ONLY.

As I waited my turn, in the white-only line, I had to pinch myself. I’d never, ever seen this in Chicago. “Good god, it’s segregated, just like Alabama and Mississippi.”

I retrieved my suitcase from the belly of the bus and retreated to the edge of the crowd. Standing on tiptoes, I scanned for my brother, who was nowhere to be seen. I sat down on my suitcase to wait.

Before long, a boy sporting a ten-gallon hat, tooled boots, and the biggest belt buckle I’d ever seen, strolled up to me. “Howdy and welcome to Big D!” he said. “Can I offer you a lift, little darlin’?”

While I was totally tongue-tied, the guy stood over me staring. Finally I blurted out, “I’m waiting for someone.”

“I’ll just wait along with y’all,” he offered.

“No, you won’t. Go away.”

Fifteen minutes later, another fellow approached me. “I’m waiting for someone,” I said before he opened his mouth.

“I know. Your brother sent me,” he replied. “My name is Bob. My friends call me Socks
.”

“Maybe, but I don’t know you.”

This boy took my skepticism in stride. He invited me to follow him to the phone booth while he called my wayward brother. “Jesus, Claire,” a still-groggy Jay R. said. “Socks is my friend. He’s okay.”

“What are you doing in bed in the middle of the afternoon?”

“Shut up and get in his car,” was my brother’s response.

Thirty minutes later, I got a look at my new home. The University of Dallas was housed in a dozen cement-block, flat-roofed buildings plopped on a thousand acres of scrubland. A few spindly trees hung over the walkway. Beyond that dirt and tufts of dry grass stretched to the horizon.

“This is really ugly,” I said.

“You’ll get used to it,” Socks promised.

“I hope not.”

Socks hauled my stuff into the dorm and gave me directions to the student center, which was called the SUB. On his way out, he stopped and called, “Claire, don’t take a shower without shoes.”

“Why?”

“Bugs.”

I quickly learned what he meant by bugs. The construction around campus had unearthed hordes of multi-legged creatures that scurried around looking for new homes. Scorpions, beetles, and other creepy crawlies appeared in closet corners, shoes, and damp towels.

Before that fall, the only tarantulas I’d ever seen were behind plate glass in the Lincoln Park Zoo. Imagine my shock when a big hairy one showed up in my desk drawer. Having no idea what else to do, I screamed.

Without any fanfare, one of my new friends, a homegrown Texas girl, captured the thing in a towel and tossed it out the window. “You’ll get used to them,” she told me. “They’re all over Texas.”

“No, I won’t.”

Already the university had two strikes against it: the ugly campus and the huge bugs. Then came strike three: the rules, or, more accurately, the rules for women.

Sunday through Thursday, freshman girls had to be in the dorm by 8 p.m. for a two-hour, monitored study time—no music, no talking, no exceptions. Every night at 10:30, we gathered in the hall for mandatory prayers. At 11:30, it was lights out.

On the weekend, we could stay out until 11 p.m., unless we used one of our half-dozen late passes, tickets to an extra hour of freedom. Come home late, however, and the guilty girl would be grounded. Or, in UD talk, “campused.”

The boys, however, were exempt from all of this. As one male upperclassman told me, “Being of the superior sex has its privileges.”

The double standard riled some of us, but arguments for equal treatment fell on deaf ears. The nun, who was our dorm moderator, explained, “The rules are for your own good. You are girls, after all.”